


Misapprehensions

by Alona



Category: Hilary Tamar Mysteries - Sarah Caudwell
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:35:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: A number of people get the wrong idea, Julia among them.





	Misapprehensions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [untilitbleeds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/untilitbleeds/gifts).



"I don't suppose it can be murder," said Julia over breakfast. 

Selena finished spreading jam on a muffin and deposited the finished product on Julia's plate. "My dear Julia," she answered readily, "of course not. I'd be more inclined to call it a calculated insult." 

"But surely," Julia insisted, tipping coffee into her cup and managing to spill only a few additional drops onto the already liberally spattered tablecloth, "it was very sudden?"

"Oh, do you think so? I for one am convinced they never would have invited me had they not known that this elderly Miss What's-her-name was ready to shuffle off at any moment and let them out of honoring their invitation. I shouldn't be so very troubled on my own account, you know, but it's quite mortifying to have inveigled you into accompanying me with the promise of luxurious and romantic accommodations, only to force you to stoop to these miserable and entirely mundane surroundings. A less generous woman, my dear Julia, would be very cross with me." 

"Oh, no, Selena, the thought never crossed my mind of blaming you." Julia gulped some excellent coffee. "And the hotel is hardly miserable, even if it isn't a château. I daresay the château, while undoubtedly more romantic, would have been drafty, labyrinthine and otherwise thoroughly uncomfortable, as such places inevitably are in works of fiction. Not to mention, as we observed last night for ourselves, being nowhere near as close to the sea." 

"I'm glad to hear you put such a brave face on it," Selena said. She heaved a lengthy sigh, then bit into a delicate and buttery croissant. 

They were nearly alone on the breakfast terrace, owing to the late hour at which they had risen. A striped awning protected them from the already warm morning sun; the awning fluttered in the gentle, cooling breeze which, as it wafted in from the sparkling sea, was perfumed by the wild jasmine growing on the slope below the hotel. 

Of course, Julia reflected, if she was perfectly comfortable now, she had not begun so. Last night indeed there had been frustration, even despair, which had lingered into the morning, despite a night of untroubled sleep. Julia dated her inward calm to the moment she had walked out of the bathroom after her shower to be greeted by the sight of Selena sitting on the end of their bed, bathed in sunlight and wrapped in a nest of bedclothes, talking sweetly and incisively into the phone with a look of ineffable malice on her face. She had rung off, looking satisfied, and then said, "That should keep nicely for the rest of the trip." 

Julia thought that might have consoled her for more evils than their current situation had yet inflicted on her. The chief evil had occurred the night before. 

The Penningtons, Selena's friends, had recently taken the whim of purchasing and renovating a château in the south of France. When they had extended an invitation to Selena and a guest of her choosing to stay with them, Selena had passed the invitation along to Julia, who had thought the notion an excellent one; everything had been quickly arranged. Only at the last minute an elderly aunt or some such person had died, and the telegram informing Selena that they would regrettably be unable to receive her due to bereavement had arrived in chambers only after Julia and Selena had boarded their plane. Owing to some further miscommunication, not too clearly understood by either woman, it had not been until their taxi had driven them up to the château, quite late in the evening, that they had been informed of the death and been turned away. At the time it had seemed a disaster of unprecedented and mortifying proportions. 

However, their taxi driver, whom Julia had been inclined to find fault with for being middle-aged and plump when ideally he should have been youthful and svelte, and for affecting not to understand her attempts at speaking French, had made it known that he had a sister who operated a hotel by the sea and who would be only too happy to put up two charming lady customers of his. There had not seemed to be much else to do, so they had agreed to give the hotel a try. 

"No doubt he's very pleased with himself for bringing custom to his relation," Selena had said, much aggrieved and blithely secure in her conviction of the driver's understanding no English. 

Julia had not been quite as certain on that score, and it had occasioned her some anxiety in case the man's feelings should have been hurt; she was a noble soul, as Selena often remarked, and accorded even plump and middle-aged men the right to have feelings which might be hurt. 

In the dark the hotel had not made a very positive first impression on them, and the taxi driver's sister had, without explanation, given them a room with only one bed. However, as they both hastened to observe, it was a very large bed, and anyway all either of them was interested in doing was collapsing into it at the earliest opportunity, which they had almost at once with great success. This had eventually led to the scene already described which had had such a salutary effect upon Julia's feelings. She was therefore inclined to forgive the taxi driver his shortcomings and his sister her peculiarities of rooming arrangements. She was even well on her way to overlooking the Penningtons' insult, though not to giving up her curiosity about the circumstances giving rise to it. 

"Was she very ill, this elderly aunt?" she asked. 

"What?" asked Selena. Then, seeming to take note of the drift of Julia's conversation at last, she said seriously, "I have not the least doubt that it was a natural death." 

"I wonder what her testamentary dispositions were." 

"Hardly relevant, in any case, since the Penningtons are all extremely wealthy." 

"Or so you believe them to be," Julia countered. "Perhaps they've sunk too much money into the château and are now penniless." 

"Well, it may be something like that. I don't know them well enough to say. But in any case this Mrs. Honeycastle—that was it, Honeycastle—had no great wealth to dispose of. Now that I think of it, I believe she was an embarrassing poor relation who had done something scandalous in her youth. But I can see you're still troubled, Julia. We might go this afternoon and pay our respects. Give them a chance to apologize properly, too, for putting us off like that, ask a few discreet questions of our own. Once you know more about it I'm sure all your doubts will be assuaged." 

"And if instead the visit heightens my doubts—or confirms my fears?"

"Then," said Selena with a shrug, "we shall get Hilary out here to sort it out." 

"Does Hilary know the Penningtons?"

"No, but I doubt that would prove in any way an impediment." 

Julia smiled. "No, I don't suppose it would. Will there be occasion to send for Hilary, do you think?"

"Certainly not," Selena answered, very decidedly. 

 

They left to pay their visit early in the afternoon and returned rather earlier than either had been counting on. All the same a great many things had transpired during the visit, and Julia was at some pains, in the seclusion of their room, to review them and get them all in order. 

"As a trained legal professional," she said, "I have always considered myself superior to the average individual in arranging a collection of facts into a coherent narrative. But I confess, my dear Selena, the precise circumstances surrounding your friends and their misadventures elude me with their profusion and their complexity." 

Selena, who had stretched herself out on the bed and kicked off her shoes, remarked, "Well, perhaps that's less to do with your training, and more to do with the fact that you _would_ keep accepting glasses of wine."

"It seemed the only thing one could safely do. Besides, if I was a little tipsy on the drive back, I am now restored to as much of sobriety as I can find desirable, and I find all is by no means clear to me."

"But you accept now that there is no murder involved?" 

Julia considered this. "I take it that your argument is that the profusion of crimes both legal and moral—or do I want to say both spiritual and temporal?—means that any further crime would be extraneous? I am not certain I could agree with that. The presence of one crime, or indeed of half a dozen crimes of varying severity, is more likely to engender further crimes, is it not?" 

"My argument was more that it is highly unlikely anyone would have had the time to spare from Alice and Colin's domestic dispute, and the discovery that the young lady they had both been pursuing extramarital affairs with was both a burglar and a notorious forger, to find out Miss Honeycastle's scheme of using the château as a bordello and kill her to put a stop to it." Selena sighed. "Goodness, but that's all hopelessly tangled up." 

"Yes, isn't it? And who was that quiet, heavyset young man who kept trying to apologize and explain things?"

"That was Will Pennington, Alice and Bella's younger brother." Selena paused. "You know, I hadn't met him before, and I did have some anxiety lest he should prove to be in possession of a profile. I was relieved to find him plain and unremarkable." 

"Though it is too bad that he should be plain, when his sisters are both so pretty. Bella in particular I thought perfect of her type—those dark eyelashes with her auburn hair! But why should you be relieved about young Mr. Pennington's plainness, Selena? You can't imagine that I would have been so churlish as to use our vacation to chase after a profile, however distinguished." 

"I depend entirely upon your manners, Julia, but I have known your enthusiasm run away with you." Selena abruptly sat up and fixed Julia with a sober look, such as she might employ in a courtroom before introducing an appeal to the sentiments. "I confess that if you had taken a liking to Will Pennington's profile, it would have caused no small amount of disorder in my plans. You see, I had an ulterior motive in inviting you on this vacation." 

"How delightful, Selena!" Julia exclaimed. "And how very convenient. I myself had an ulterior motive in accepting the invitation. Not that the pleasure of your company is not on its own motive enough. In fact..." 

"In fact," Selena was quick to interject, "it is the pleasure of my company that led you to form the—let us discard the word 'ulterior' as being overly burdened with negative connotations—the _secondary_ motive?"

"Exactly so," said Julia, altogether charmed to be so readily understood. "But of course you understand. You are always so much better able to explain my feelings than I am myself. The pleasure of your company, and the frequency with which outsiders mistake the nature of our relationship has led me to reflect on whether it is not we who are mistaken." 

"I am only so well able to follow your thoughts here because my own have charted much the same course. It would appear, my dear Julia, that we have each set out with the goal of seducing the other." 

Julia found it appropriate at this juncture to remove from the window where she had been wrestling out of her dress, the zipper of which had been exhibiting behavior troubling to see in a zipper, and take her place upon the bed. "Do you know," she said, "the rooms here are not much more than half full? So that the taxi driver's sister must have given us this room with its single bed acting on the same misapprehension of which I was just speaking?" 

"But where would she have imbibed such a notion?"

"Perhaps it was something I said. You know that I am not really so successful a linguist as you are kind enough to pretend, Selena."

"Nonsense," said Selena firmly. "Whatever you said and however it was understood, I hope I may say it was not too far from the truth, or rather from what shortly will be the truth?" 

Julia, being a sophisticated woman of the world, knew well enough to recognize a direct proposition when she heard one. Later she and Selena were able to agree that whatever the misunderstanding had been, its convenience greatly outweighed any potential for awkwardness.


End file.
